The Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences (AIAS) is pleased to announce four additional speakers for the 2018 D.I.C.E. Summit (#DICE18), taking place Feb. 20-22 in Las Vegas. Leading video game executives and creators will gather to participate in the premier industry networking event and listen to key speakers address the conference theme - Made Better - tackling some of the industry’s biggest ideas and trends.

Neil Druckmann, the Creative Director of award-winning games such as The Last of Us, Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End and the Director of the highly anticipated The Last of Us Part II and Dan Trachtenberg, Director and Writer of 10 Cloverfield Lane and the much-lauded Black Mirror episode “Playtest” about the chilling future of AR/MR, will appear on the D.I.C.E. Summit stage in a conversation about the creative process in crafting character-driven experiences for video games. Dan will lead a fireside chat titled “Crafting Narratives for Video Games, Film, and Television”, where these two creative forces will be discussing the intersection of, and unique challenges presented by, the interactive and non-interactive mediums.

Storytelling is in our DNA and many historians believe it's why Homo Sapiens dominated. Storytelling's power is getting you to care so much about characters that you want to know what happens to them. In VR/AR, players can care about these characters even more than in traditional media, so much so that you interact with them because you care, not because you want to win. Maureen Fan, CEO of Baobab Studios believes VR/AR allows us to create experiences with the empathy of film, agency of games, and motivation of real life. Instead of passively wondering what you would do if you were a character in that story, you actively live those decisions, because you care about those characters. At the D.I.C.E. Summit Maureen will talk about Baobab’s learnings through their VR/AR experiments in her session, “Emotions in VR”.

Executive Producer and Artist Maja Moldenhauer and the Moldenhauer brothers started the Cuphead journey as the original members. None of them had any traditional game development experience – only a common dream goal to make a really challenging, retro game with a unique hand-drawn art style. In her session, “The Cuphead Journey: A Four-Year Knockout Indie Success Story” she will share a behind the scenes in-depth look at StudioMDHR’s creative process to build the magical Inkwell Isle, a culmination of all the creative influences from their childhood on. In addition, she will share stories of arduous indie development and how they chased a dream, how having a clear vision created unique processes and overcame development challenges, how bucking trends and having unwavering faith in a project can set a game apart, how art for art's sake can bring out the best in a team and why risking it all was worth it.